Category: English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in English 11 Regents for the 2018-2019 school year.

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Pre-GAP Triage: November 5, 2018

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Space Explainers

Note for the week of November 5: The scoring panels, as always, refer to the calendar for the year.

For Q1A of 2018, students were given a set of exhaustive notes on their progress. For Q1B, they were again given notes on collective and individual progress in English 10, English 11, or AP English.

Those same students will read this post on November 5. Q1C ends on Friday, November 9. Current progress and provisional GAP scores, correct as of November 5, are the end of this instructional post.

This is triage, and it is designed not just to help students, but to give them clarity and agency.

Why a Spreadsheet

I want to explain why I am taking such pains to create a spreadsheet instead of using Infinite Campus. As always, this is in addition to the many kinds of feedback we use regularly.

First, a spreadsheet requires each student to do a little more work to see what is missing, what is insufficient, etc., which shakes off the fog of habit. Infinite Campus is part of a routine. Feedback outside of that routine is likely to be processed more mindfully.

Second, this shows each student the entire class. The notes are anonymous, so it’s about the collective learning environment. Every student has a role to play in what kind of classroom we have.

Third, this kind of spreadsheet is somewhere in between scores on individual assignments and narratives. I believe Alfie Kohn is right that “posting grades online is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.” It is also inevitable. We are looking for the line between that toxic salience and a sustainable feedback model.

When I find time, I will rewrite this old clarification of grade abatement, because most of it is prescient about what ends up mattering most1. Look at this section:

The crux of grade abatement is the idea that we can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments. There are a number of points to address, however, before we delve into how that works:

  1. Grades aren’t necessarily toxic. The presence of grades does not preclude effective teaching and learning. In fact, the case can be made that grades are useful, that they motivate students, that they provide valuable data, and so on. It also doesn’t do us any good to demonize grades. All we need to do is acknowledge that…

  2. Grades do warp learning. Grades change the learning environment. Kohn covers a lot of the research worth studying — research into student engagement, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and so on — but anyone with experience in a classroom knows what grades do. As soon as numbers are introduced, the student’s relationship to the material changes. That’s why the quotation at the start of Kohn’s essay rings so true: When the student, Claire, says, “I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing… Suddenly all the joy was taken away,” we hear our own students. And that’s because…

  3. While grades aren’t necessarily toxic, they are vectors for toxicity. Think of them as clouds of mosquitoes in a malaria-ravaged country. Grades can — and often do — lead to gamesmanship, cheating, hyper-competitiveness, disengagement, and almost every other enemy of authentic learning. Students scrap and fight over a hundredth of a point. They define their self-worth in numbers. They’re afraid to take risks. Grades spread this negativity from assignment to assignment and quarter to quarter. Unfortunately…

  4. Whatever we believe, grades are unavoidable. It isn’t possible to abolish grades in a public high school. You might as well try exterminating every mosquito in the world. What we can change is the extent to which grades affect learning in our classrooms. We can’t change the entire system, but we can remove grades from most steps in the learning process, chip away at a student’s extrinsic motivations, and build a self-powered kind of learning.

Grades are vectors for toxicity. They spread the habits that hurt authentic learning. That’s the key distinction I keep forgetting: A number itself does nothing until it’s tied to a GPA, the threat of failing, the shadow of college acceptance, and so on.

These spreadsheet numbers are simple. They convey only the most basic kind of feedback about work — again, because more meaningful feedback is given in other ways. But some students truly need to be shown that they aren’t handing in work. Telling them isn’t enough. Showing them in person isn’t enough. Even a GAP score isn’t enough. They need to see a zero next to an assignment.

What This Means

We have to recognize that institutionalized students are motivated by certain symbols. These spreadsheets weaponize that through a simple set of annotations and some conditional formatting added to Google Sheets2.

Any student work that has the potential to receive feedback gets a 0, 1, or 2. Other work (e.g., bringing in donations for a charity drive, submitting a form) gets checked in for completion only. That’s a stripped-down version of this:

Take that, which is clear enough, and strip it down further, and it’s just 0, 1, or 2. The conditional formatting added to the Google Sheet automatically converts those three choices to a color. A student doing an adequate or better job sees green, as in, “Keep going.” A student not doing work sees a zero in red — probably the two most powerful symbols of error or failure in school.

The zero is not factored into an average in any mathematical way. It indicates only that an assignment wasn’t completed. Some students need the zero in a red box to begin to process and adjust to the reality that they didn’t do the work.

The vexing part of this is that no student should be that unaware when an assignment doesn’t get handed in. The deadline comes and goes. My co-teachers and I give feedback to other, adjacent students. The work is discussed. We use a dozen different techniques to differentiate and reiterate and redirect. Yet we know it is necessary to indicate, again, that the work is missing or insufficient.

What this kind of spreadsheet really does, therefore, is this: It pushes students to take couple of extra steps to engage with numbers that aren’t vectors for traditional toxicity, and it uses red, yellow, and green colors to trigger something basic.

Note: Functionally Missing

Some students hand in work that is so insufficient that it is functionally missing. It’s barely there. There’s no there there. The work isn’t missing, but that’s another reason to avoid traditional grades: That area of student quasi-compliance has to be investigated with more nuance. Yes, there was an effort to hand something in, but it doesn’t matter when that something is a non-starter for feedback.

As an example, I’ll use an assignment given to juniors. The prompt asked for a response to a lengthy article. Students were given the article ahead of time, and then they were given a day to write — 40 minutes or so in class, plus the rest of the day and night to finish, as necessary.

The instructions called this response an essay. It didn’t have to be five paragraphs or feature a thesis, but it had to be developed. It was the foundation of in-class work and further reading.

Here’s a “finished” response with significant composition errors (“perposley,” run-on sentence, etc.) and no development:

Humans are addicted to procrastination you can stop hesitating to work by making work the only thing to do like perpoisley be bored like the author of the hunchback of notre dame he locked away all of his clothes and wore a sackcloth so he can stay home and finish his books. Moral of the story it is more important to start work than to get it done.

That’s not an essay, no matter what definition of the word we want to use. In the spreadsheets below (which include this assignment), that response is a 1. This is coded as a 0:

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout.
This quote means that Procrastination never fails to beat someone

It’s functionally missing. There is no feedback to give.

Note: In-Class Focus

In-class focus is the first and most important step to successful learning. Spreadsheets like the one below can be used to indicate how focused students have been. In the past, some have argued that they were only off-task for a moment, or that it only looked like they were off-task, or that they finished the work, or some other excuse. But this misses the point.

I am not looking to catch students off-task. Neither are any co-teachers in the makerspace with me. We are looking to help students who are focused. We are looking to help them with their work. We are giving them feedback and redirection. We are building posts and projects and lessons. That takes our focus and attention. We aren’t watching the room for mistakes.

If a student is off-task often enough or significantly enough during a GAP panel for it to affect a profile, it’s a serious lapse. These are students who are doing homework for other classes without permission, who are on social media repeatedly, who are gossiping and chatting. It’s well past the point of semantics, debate, and appeal.

It’s also critical for students not to elide how often they’re told to get back on task. This isn’t a gotcha environment. Any teacher in this space is constantly and kindly pointing out the serious repercussions of not doing work. We’re here to help you to focus, hence entire units built as triage for exactly that purpose.

Therefore, a student with a 0 or a 1 for in-class focus on a spreadsheet has been told, again and again, that they are off task, individually and generally, with opportunities to improve. They have continued not to meet the most basic expectations of the space, despite this feedback. The 0 or 1 is designed to deliver a sort of limbic shock: Yes, you need to work harder.

Provisional GAP Scores and Assignment Data: November 5, 2018

Sorted by student number:

  1. The scoring scales are wrong, and the skill/trait criteria are less precise than they are now. It’s the philosophical stuff that remains useful. That’s the problem with a one-man show, at least as far as writing the guides goes: I’m running to stand still. ↩

  2. In this post from a previous year, the feedback is much lengthier, but it teaches a tremendous amount by being so lengthy. Over time, these old posts become connective threads: links that can be used for the truly motivated and invested students to deepen their learning. The practical work, like the implementation of a spreadsheet, can be more straightforward, as a result. ↩

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English 11 GAP Q1B: Added Value

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Look up the word provisional, or click here for the definition. Then read on.

Within an hour after this post goes live, you will have provisional GAP scores for Q1B. These scores are low, for many of you, because of missing and incomplete work. A lack of in-class focus led to lower profiles, too.

If you want to raise your scores slightly before the end of the day on Friday, you will have that opportunity. You can demonstrate your amenability, self-awareness, integrity, etc., while producing the kind of evidence that fits higher profiles.

Step #1: Pick new seats. This could be forced on you, but it will be more impactful if you make the decision yourselves. Pick new seats that give you a better chance to focus. You must adjust, because your current seats aren’t helping.

Step #2: Complete the GAP Q1B report posted to Google Classroom. Be honest and specific. You have permission to do this a day early (see our calendar again for a reminder of these assessment dates). As necessary, let the provisional score you’ve been given direct you toward an accounting of mistakes and poor choices.

Step #3: Then write a separate reflection about your use of this space and your approach to our work. Explain what you will do to be successful in the future. Make this meaningful and insightful. Attach it to the Classroom assignment for the GAP report.

Do that, do it accurately and insightfully, and you’ll have demonstrated enough of the skills and traits that matter to raise your profile — and, as a direct result, you will raise that number in the gradebook. For more on how that works, you can read this:

Dürer’s Rhinoceros

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Q1A Data: General Feedback

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

The Basics: Q1A

Below are simplified spreadsheets cobbled together for your benefit. You need your student number to find your row. In each column, there is a zero (0), one (1), or two (2). This is feedback about the most basic requirements of the assignment or, in the case of in-class focus, the class itself. 2 indicates anything sufficient, consistent, complete, etc., and above. Anything other than a 2 is cause for concern.

Again, this is basic, did-you-do-your-work feedback. Authentic and meaningful feedback is explained in a post you’ve already been assigned. There are plenty of other explanations of how feedback functions in a makerspace. The data in these spreadsheets serves a different purpose. Two notes before we get to that:

  1. First, these notations ignore late work entirely. If you got any of this done before Monday morning around 8 AM, it went into this chart. Anything after 8 AM on October 1 is not indicated here.
  2. Second, these notations don’t include the first revision assignment, nor do they reflect my observations of your use of feedback.

Here are the spreadsheets:

What Should You Do Next?

It’s pretty straightforward: Help yourself, and then help your peers.

To help yourself, find an hour over the next week to enter this conversation online:

Ongoing Discussion: Dunning-Kruger Effects and Imposter Syndromes

To help your peers, find an hour over the next week to enter this conversation:

Ongoing Discussion: Herd Immunity

If you’re interested in doing a little more to help your peers, you should skim this document:

That is a copy of every self-assessment response for the first GAP panel. I’ve removed any identifying information beyond the class period. Since the language is universal, there is a lot of insight to be gained, regardless of age, level, course, etc., provided you read with empathy.

Otherwise, remember what we’ve already reviewed in class as our goals for the week. Here are pictures of the whiteboards in our classroom:

My goal is to give every student the vocabulary to talk about themselves, to advocate for themselves, to analyze themselves, etc., regardless of context. This course will give you that vocabulary, slowly but surely, if you invest in it. It’s the language of all learning. It’s not esoteric jargon. Remember that it connects explicitly to the district’s Strategic Coherence Plan:

That plan is based on everything we know about what colleges and careers demand. These are the skill and traits you need to be successful. Every time you receive feedback, you need to look for a way to hone those skills and traits.

But this is probably the most important takeaway: There’s nothing unusual about what we do in here. We read books, write essays, discuss essential questions, and reflect on our progress. Whether you’re focused on helping yourself or helping others1, that progress starts with an honest reckoning with what you’ve done.

Ask questions about the spreadsheets below.

  1. There shouldn’t be any stigma attached to helping yourself, because that’s how you find the knowledge and understanding to help others. It starts with you. If it becomes selfish or competitive, we can always deal more directly with that. ↩

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Organization: Getting Things Done

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

From the profile of an INTJ, or “Architect.” Click for the website by NERIS Analytics Limited, which includes a free test and explanation of these personality classifications.

 

Getting Things Done, Part 1

The school year, regardless of course or level, comes down to two elements:

The GAP Process

The Pareto Project: Complete Guide

The GAP process governs our units of study, whether you are an AP student practicing for the exam in May or a tenth grader reading a novel in November. Grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits govern our learning. You receive three profile scores per quarter.

Your personal or community-based projects will be the focus of most Fridays. You’ll be in charge of how you spend that time. Each course will have a calendar that indicates when these projects will be presented and shared, too.

These two elements require you to be organized, and organization is one of the universal skills and traits you need. Load the grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits, and notice that the foundation of your learning is organization. The rest of the components concatenate1, but they can’t be linked together without organization:

This screenshot is from one of the older iterations of grade abatement, and I’m using it to highlight the header:

Above all else:
Explore, create, learn

“Explore, create, learn.” That really is the focus of our work, and when you’re immersed in self-directed writing or putting time into your Pareto Project, it’ll be exciting work. But it’s the much-less-exciting work of organization that gets us into that maker mentality.

You are reading this post because you need to organize the academic stuff you have on you. That word, stuff, comes from a root meaning “to equip,” and that’s the idea: You equip yourself every day in order to deal with school and the work it requires. You gear up.

So you need a frank assessment of how you do that. You need to assess your organization. Divide that assessment into these four categories, and then use our in-class discussions and workshops to improve each one.

① Physical Organization

Start by opening up your backpack or bag, any and all notebooks you keep for your classes, your vintage Trapper Keeper, etc., and then pouring that stuff out onto a table. (That can be a metaphorical act, of course.) Then assess the extent to which you have a system in place. Can you find materials you need? How ordered is your physical stuff? What does it all look like?

② Digital Organization

You probably have a number of tabs open right now, as you read this instructional post. Start there: How do you keep track of what you’re reading and studying online? Do you have a system for organizing those tabs? Then consider specifically your use of Google, especially Google Drive, Google Classroom, and Gmail. Do you have a system of folders in Drive to keep your work clear and accessible? Do you use a system to sort through email? How do you keep track of assignments, announcements, and instructional posts?

③ Schedule Organization

Your schedule overlaps with the first two, but it has been helpful in the past to separate it. Consider specifically your use of a calendar or planner. Do you use the calendar provided for this course? If so, to what extent? If not, how do you organize your days and weeks? How do you keep up with your responsibilities?

④ Mental Organization

This category overlaps with the rest, too, but it helps to isolate it. It is, in essence, about the grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits that direct all of your learning:

The GAP Process

To what extent do you understand the universal skills and traits at the heart of this process? How do you organize your work in here around those skills and traits? Do you use the profiles to map out your work during each GAP triptych panel? What does that learning map look like?

⑤ All Together

Your goal is to find the room for improvement in each one of these organizational categories. To do that, you need accurate self-assessment and observation, discussion with your peers and teachers, and concrete plans for improvement.

If this post is assigned formally, you will be given further directions. You don’t need them, though. You need to test your improvements. You’ll know if they work by putting them into practice.

Getting Things Done, Part 2

As a possibly important sidebar, let’s talk about your personalities. Your self-awareness and sense of self-efficacy are tied to that amorphous idea of “personality,” and you can gain some important insights through simple, online tests.

Start with an introduction to the concept we’ll be using, and then jump right into the test itself:

This isn’t required, of course, but you’re likely to be interested enough in the concept to take the test. It will give you a four-letter code and a detailed explanation of what those letters mean. Once you have the code, either before or while you are reading the explanations, make sure you know what the Forer effect is:

No online test dictates who you are. Understanding the Forer effect is one way to ward off taking these things too seriously. These sorts of tests can help, though, and here is why: When we’re talking about how you organize yourself in here, we’re really talking about you as a whole person. A personality test, especially one as steeped in good research as this one, might be useful, if you are cautious and remember how powerful the Forer effect is.

The idea is not that a personality test is inaccurate or useless. It’s that you must be metacognitively vigilant about anything a website tells you, especially when your goal is self-improvement. I have long thought of myself as an INTJ, for instance, but I see more and more of myself in the description of an INTP these days. I don’t need to take the test itself again; I can read through the differences and apply that knowledge to myself. Since I believe those differences are crucial to my development as a teacher, I have a starting point for meaningful metacognitive discussion and writing.

It’s the same for you. You want a sense of yourself as a whole person:

This kind of self-assessment is organizational because it can generate forward momentum. It can improve the efficacy of other elements of your approach to learning. If you take this online test — or any others; here’s a much lengthier one called the IPIP-NEO that some students have said taught them about themselves — be sure you read all the context and explanation the site provides, keep the warning of the Forer effect in mind, and then do some reflective and metacognitive writing and discussion.

From the profile of an INTP, or “Logician”

  1. Look that word up. I’ve always liked it because it sounds like its definition — like links being clipped together. ↩

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Convergent and Divergent Exercises

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Screenshot from the full RSA Animate poster. Click for the whole thing.

In Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on education, he gives this definition of divergent thinking1:

Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity. I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking isn’t a synonym; it’s an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways of interpreting a question, to think laterally, to think not just in linear or convergent ways, to see multiple answers, not one…

There are tests for this. One cod example would be, “How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?” Most people might be able to come up with ten or fifteen. People who are good at this might come up with two hundred. And they do that by saying, “Well, could the paper clip be two hundred feet tall and made out of foam rubber?”

Our makerspace treats reading and writing as acts that require divergent thinking. Literature is, as this video puts it, “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” something we “prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing.” Writing, as probably best expressed by Paul Graham, is our tool for discovering truth and investigating what’s interesting about ourselves and the world around us. Our reading and writing makes up the vast majority of the divergent work we do.

The other kind of thinking that matters (in our classroom and in life) is convergent thinking, which is about finding the right answer to a problem that has only one or two right answers. You’ll find that some of the problems we attempt to solve, whether they come up in class or elsewhere, have a limited set of solutions. There might be a fairly strict set of boundaries, and it’s within those boundaries that you must think creatively and divergently. It’s also within the necessary step of metacognition that you must think creatively and divergently.

The Exercises: Ordeals and Ditloids

This is a two-day exercise in divergent and convergent thinking. It is also a two-day exercise in the following:

  1. Reading flipped instruction in preparation for in-class work
  2. Collaborating effectively during the class period
  3. Analyzing an activity metacognitively
  4. Using the resources of the Internet effectively

The last one is interesting. You could use Google (or Bing, bless its heart) to find the solutions to each of these exercises. You could find a dozen more examples of this kind of exercise, and for each of those, you could find the answers.

That’s entirely by design. At some point, you will always need to rely on someone to give you feedback — to help you when you’re stuck, to verify a correct answer, etc. — and the Internet is usually the proxy for that someone. That device you have gives you access to nearly limitless information, including the responses of any other teacher or student who has done this work.

That makes the divergent question metacognitive: When and why do you look for help? How much time do you give yourself to be frustrated? What are the best solutions to managing these resources, including your peers? How do you process this kind of exercise?

The assignment that will be posted to Google Classroom is straightforward: Submit a copy of some of that metacognitive writing. This is evidence of the most important GAP criteria, of course, but it also helps build the habit of always unpacking your experiences. You should always take a bit of time to reflect on what you’ve learned and to be metacognitive about your choices. As Neil Postman wrote, “[T]he most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns.”

You can do these exercises in any order. That, too, is part of the divergent decision-making process.

The first exercise: “Ordeal by Cheque”

The first exercise is about deductive reasoning. You must piece together a narrative from nothing but a series of scanned checks:

Crue’s story was first published in 1932 in Vanity Fair. It’s interesting that this edition comes from a teaching textbook, since that underscores how many answers you’re going to find online when you get to that step.

You’ll have a hard copy of these pages, and that’s actually where the deductive reasoning will begin. You will be strongly encouraged not to head online until you’ve worked collaboratively, with deductive tools like whiteboards and markers, on a solution. What can you accomplish with just your collaborative reasoning ability?

You won’t be satisfied with just telling the story to each other as you work. You’ll need to write it down. When you search online for other theories, you’ll find fully developed narratives. You’ll want your own for comparison.

The second exercise: 24 Hours in a Day

The second exercise is a ditloid, which is a type of word puzzle that relies on deductive reasoning. From a set of abbreviations, you must determine what common phrase or idiom fits. These exercises are commonly associated with Mensa, the high-IQ society, which I mention only to tell you that IQ scores are overrated in education. You can find many examples of ditloids on a wide variety of subjects. Here is one:

Again, the divergent questions are metacognitive in nature: Will you wait to look up the answers? Will you tackle these alone, or in groups? What are you learning about how you solve problems like these? At what point does your pattern recognition stall or speed up?

 

Use the comment section here to ask questions about the metacognitive component of this work, to share insights into what you and your peers have accomplished, or to post links to the answers you’ve found online. You can even share other ditloids or atypical narratives that were inspired by Crue’s “Ordeal,” if you find them.

Remember, too, that this is part of most student’s introduction to our makerspace, which means you might find yourself interacting well outside of your normal peer group — and that’s a very good thing.

  1. Note: The language has been edited a bit for readability. ↩

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On Going “Paperless”

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o7buaXbhWCIvbY6cg/giphy.gif

Papercraft Sisyphus by Karakuri Workshop. Available for purchase here.

Makerspaces, Paper, and the Reading Process

The following quotation informs a lot of what we do, especially through the sentence I’ve bolded:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

We’re as interested in metacognition as critical thinking. We’re as interested in why we do what we do as our actual actions. Explanatory posts like this are part of that philosophy. It’s also why we preface everything we read — every novel, essay, poem, etc. — with these:

The first link is to a post that contains the rest of the material. The Lifehacker article and video invite us to discuss how literature helps us; the excerpt from John Holt’s book invites us to discuss how to teach reading; the textbook chapter offers some practical advice for reading; and the instructional post ties it together with a look at types of reading, types of readers, and how it all connects to 21st-century skills.

Fittingly, these prefatory texts also let us talk about why we are a “paperless” classroom. The operative word, paperless, is in quotation marks because it isn’t a strict rule: The intention is to lessen the amount of paper we use and to make much more deliberate use of that resource, not to eliminate paper entirely.

For instance, we need printed copies of Holt’s essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” because we’ll use it to practice close reading. That is once again about how we learn — the kinesthetic aspect of annotating and interacting — as much as the subject matter. With only a few exceptions, this is also true of all of our central essays, short stories, novels, etc., because of the need to practice close reading.

The video on the importance of literature can’t be printed, of course. The Lifehacker post introducing it could be printed, but there isn’t much benefit to that; watching the video is a screen-dependent activity, and even annotation would start with what we see online.

The idea of going paperless helps us most with instructional posts, like the organizational one for the reading process and, more critically, the post on adopting a new approach to reading. Printing either of those would require you to go back online to click links and fill in the required contextual information while reading. That isn’t to say that there’s no point in printing. I almost always need a printed copy of what I read to mark up. That’s the habit I’ve developed. Anyone who benefits from a physical copy should print whatever they want to print. As a rule for the general student, however, printing an instructional post is unnecessary. These are interstitial and interactive posts.

It would be like printing the New York Times article included in “Well, Why Read?” That article has a half-dozen necessary hyperlinks. You’ll get the central idea of the article, of course, and be able to respond to it just fine; but you will be missing critical information, and you will have created a series of extra steps. You’ll have to go back online to click on those links. That can be done, but it needs to be done deliberately, not as our default.

As another example, consider the course syllabi. As of 2018, instead of a paper document, each syllabus is an interstitial and interactive post that invites students to revisit its ideas throughout the first few weeks and even months of the course. Printing those syllabi would require us either to strip out a lot of important information, print dozens of extra pages from those hyperlinks, or require students to go online, anyway, to click on related links and videos and so on.

The most important reason to go paperless is to allow us to update documents quickly and easily. Changes to a calendar, for instance, can create confusion if there is a printed version out there already, which is what happened in the first few weeks of 2018. I printed the calendars for all students to give them something to put in their notebooks. Less than 24 hours later, an opportunity arose that required us to begin our first novel in 10th grade two weeks early. My co-teacher and I shifted a couple of units around, but that printed calendar was made immediately irrelevant.

A paperless approach encourages students to keep their own calendars. It encourages planners and digital to-do lists and all sorts of other techniques for personalized organization. That independence is a necessary step, too.

Another example of the need to keep online content flexible takes us back to that post on the reading process:

The Reading Process

That is meant to be used repeatedly in the future, but its first posted iteration was on September 18. I made photocopies then to help students transition to paperless instruction. By September 20, I saw the need to add an entire section to the post — the third section, “What to Read,” which details the value of Medium’s curated reading lists and the power of the network of sites in Gizmodo Media Group. That was a quick edit online; it would take a few days to reprint updated copies.

Going paperless has been a journey of sorts for me, and I would invite anyone interested in that to read here:

View at Medium.com

This is the way of the world, and it isn’t a step backward. There’s no need for a dire jeremiad. Online and offline reading create a balance, if we approach both metacognitively and purposefully. Nothing will ever replace the feeling and experience of flipping through a novel, and there isn’t anything quite like printing out an essay and interacting with it; the world now talks to itself, however, in interstitial and online ways. Students have to learn to engage with that world.

And, of course, it’s a process. I’ve been working toward a “paperless” classroom for years now, and I still have entire bookcases filled with handouts. I find a half-dozen copies left behind every day by students. I recycle reams of the stuff every quarter. The hope is that the need for a bit of conservation continues to dovetail with the 21st-century skills we know matter most. If that remains true, going paperless – or “paperless,“ with liberal use of air quotes – is a necessity.

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The Pareto Project

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

NOTE TO CURRENT STUDENTS (9/14/18): We won’t be starting these projects until October 1, but I need the post online for organizational purposes. Set it aside until it’s necessary.

Cover art to DJ Signify’s Sleep No More. Listen to “Kiddie Litter,” featuring Sage Francis, here. That song underscores, in a dark and surreal and imagistic way, the idea of being anaesthetized. Compare it to “Take Me Home,” by Brother Ali, which is a song about creating things and feeling pretty good about doing that.

Something Completely Different

This project is built on the “Genius Hour” framework, which you can read about here. It continues to evolve, showcasing the strengths of the classroom makerspace: the willingness to iterate, refine, and evolve an idea; the sense to reboot that idea when necessary; the openness to feedback of all kinds. Search this site for “Pareto Project,” and you can see the long arc of it.

The best place to start, however, is with testimonials and student work:

That showcases what is possible through these projects. And for each student, it will be projects, plural — one personal, one community-based, with the flexibility to expand and contract those projects as necessary.

Here is the guide to a successful Pareto Project:

Use the PDF if you have any formatting issues with the Google Docs version. When you open the document, you should notice the many hyperlinks, which indicate that this is designed to be read online, interstitially, with an opportunity to ask questions and research answers at your own pace. You can (and probably should) print individual pages, however, to help you workshop some of the steps.

This project is probably the best example of what a Humanities makerspace produces, because it frames the project with metacognitive writing and collaborative experimentation. It’s a prime example of how to unlock the real course. Take advantage of it.

Note: With some time and a lot of coffee, I hope to get a fully converted version of the guide online as an interactive post. This will be updated when and if that happens.

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English 11 Syllabus: 2018-2019

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

An interesting thing about the word syllabus is that it comes from a misreading of Latin. That doesn’t change its meaning now, but it does let us think more critically about what a syllabus actually does, not just what we expect it to do.

This syllabus is an overview of our course. It includes the grading policy, homework policy, etc., but it is also an example itself of how instruction works — flipped so that you can access it at your own pace, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions and receive feedback.

Note: You can download a copy of this post for printing or digital annotation by using the PDF and printer options at the bottom of the page. Look for these on all instructional materials:

  

Course Description: English 11

The official course description:

Designed for students who have completed English 10, this course builds upon the skills introduced and cultivated in the previous two years with an emphasis on a close reading of a variety of texts, listening, speaking, and writing. Student writing portfolios will contain examples of the four modes of discourse. English 11R students will work towards a mastery of the elements of argument and rhetorical appeals. In June, the students will write the NYS Regents Examination, which they must pass in order to graduate. The English 11 curriculum is aligned with the Common Core Standards.

Use the following two links to see how the district’s Strategic Coherence Plan corresponds exactly to our course:

Juniors will focus on argument, which also helps prepare you for the Regents Exam you take in June. You can also expect more rigorous metacognitive work as a precursor to your senior year, college, and beyond. We will continue to hone empathy as the most crucial skill for collaboration and the skill most sought by colleges and careers.

Your teachers are your best resource through all of this. To help, they have developed a nontraditional space — one in which they act as “guides on the side,” not “sages on the stage.” Here is a guide that touches on this:

To see an example of what this space produces, and to read testimonials from former students and other stakeholders, visit the following Google Site:

The Makerspace

This classroom is a makerspace. For a quick look at what that means, watch this clip:

That scene from Apollo 13 shows the traditional makerspace experience: A group of like-minded and similarly trained folks confront a real-world problem, gather all the tools and resources they need, and then collaborate on a solution.

This reenactment of a historical scene has NASA engineers pour out a box of mechanical components. Using their expertise, they reimagine how the components can be used. As in most makerspaces, the components are physical — gears, electronics, plastic, and so on. The components can even be as small as DNA:

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/diy-biotech-vegan-cheese/

Trying to hack DNA to create cow-less milk requires the same general kind of makerspace thinking that it takes to save a bunch of stranded astronauts. Both examples fit the usual acronym attached to a makerspace: STEAM, or Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math.

English doesn’t often get a seat at the table, because its components are more abstract. Literature and writing don’t always evoke the same modular, experimental sensibility. We can change that, however, by answering two questions:

  1. What important, real-world problems are we solving in an English classroom?
  2. What components and tools do we need to solve those problems?

Well, the problems you face as a student are the problems all of us face, which are the problems that the Humanities exist to solve: What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to coexist in a society? What are my beliefs? How do I want to live my life?

There is also a framing study of education and learning, which is part of the metacognitive framework of English: What does it mean to be educated? What is the purpose of school? How does each of us learn best, and what are the most important skills and traits for our futures?

Like any makerspace, we will experiment to try to solve those problems and answer these questions. We’ll think outside the box. Sometimes we’ll dismantle the box and build a better one. Our tools and components are a set of universal skills and traits, the other human beings working beside us, and the literature and nonfiction that best teaches us how to be human.

Grading Policy

This course uses grade abatement, which is a profile-based system using a set of universal skills and traits. Here is a printable handout:

Copies of this and other assessment tools are available throughout the classroom. That includes this walkthrough of how each evidence-gathering and analytical process works:

Every three weeks, you will collaborate with your teachers to determine which profile fits the work you’ve done during those three weeks. This is a consistent, fair, and objective process. It rewards growth and collaboration much more than performative skill.

Here is a calendar that indicates (among other things) the exact date of each profile:

Make a copy of the calendar for your own use.

We are looking to self-report on Fridays, if possible, to avoid giving you work over the weekend — and to give me the weekend to do an initial run-through of your self-assessments. Note that these are 15-day evidentiary panels, three per quarter, which is enough to give us a triptych metaphor. Because of scheduled vacation days, the first semester fluctuates more; by Q3, each panel has exactly 15 scheduled class meetings1

These twelve profile scores have also been set up in advance in Infinite Campus.

Pareto Projects

That provisional calendar also shows you the shape of our year together, including the opportunity to do a one-of-a-kind project:

Pareto Project Guide (2017-2018)

Right now, the plan is to start the first projects in October. We will go over the process then. For now, you are free to read about our version of a Genius Hour project. Your first one will be personal in nature, like last year’s projects; the second, which will start in February, will be community-based.

Homework and Classwork Policy

The homework policy is built into the grading policy, specifically into the thresholds that separate upper- and lower-tier profiles from each other. Read them carefully. The penalty for failing to complete homework is significant.

Google Classroom is the central hub for required assignments. It tracks completion, including time and date stamps for submitted and edited work. We will also familiarize you with Turnitin.com, Google Forms, and other mechanisms for sharing and evaluating work.

Classwork and homework are part of what’s called interstitial learning, which is best understood through practice. It allows you to work when you work best, with one exception: You must use class time effectively. This is outlined here:

This is the usual give-and-take of a classroom: The two most basic requirements of this course, in-class focus and feedback, are also the two keys that unlock the best performance and strongest growth — as well as the highest scores. What observable habits and behavioral patterns do you create over time?

When you are uncertain about what to do in class or at home, ask for help. You can also read this annotated step-by-step guide, which is available in class, online, and as one of our classroom posters:

Required Exams

Juniors take the New York State Regents in English in June. We will practice the tasks on the English Regents periodically, especially the close reading and multiple-choice work that makes up half of the exam. You can read more about the structure of the exam here:

Individual help will be offered through Castle Learning and one-on-one workshops as needed.

Note: Because of the Regents Exam, juniors do not sit for a final exam in English during exam week.

Required Materials

Bring your district-issued Chromebook or another Internet-ready device every day. Bring paper and a pen or pencil. Keep our current novel, nonfiction, writing prompt, etc., organized and with you at all times.

Otherwise, we’ll determine together what you need to be most successful. The onus is on you to start that process, and not just because we are an English makerspace. At this point in your academic career, you need to individualize a system that helps you accomplish your goals.

We are also going to try to be as paperless as possible this year. We need to be able to edit some documents in real time and to collaborate in a more 21st-century way. You need access to the hyperlinks and connections that make up the bulk of all contemporary writing and reading.

You will still have the ability to print any materials you want printed. Think of it as responsive printing: If you need a copy of something, then you’ll get it. It’s up to you to determine that need, though, and usually to take care of it. We have a printer connected to the desktops in Room 210 for this purpose.

We will obviously print essays and other texts that we annotate together. Not everything can be done on a computer, and that’s not the point; the point is to minimize our paper use and strengthen your digital skills.

Writing Requirements

One of your goals this year is to create writing that expresses who you are before you apply for college and/or a career. You will organize yourself through Google Drive, publish through Medium and other online platforms, and document your growth in different ways.

That’s a powerful digital footprint  —  the kind of thing an admissions board or prospective employer will see when they search for you online. The world wants you to have a digital presence. This course will help you build it.

The writing itself will be driven by a universal rubric and collaborative writing process. The steps are carefully constructed to help you develop your own style while learning how to answer any prompt you are given.

Part of grade abatement is an approach to writing that gives feedback without scores or points on the writing itself. This is to encourage risk-taking, revision, and metacognition.

Reading Requirements

You need to develop a reading habit. Your success, now and in the future, increases the more you read discerningly and actively. Read a little of everything, and read whenever you can. Emulate Malcolm X, who wrote, “I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”

One way to encourage this habit is through posts like this. All instruction will be flipped online, with class time reserved for face-to-face discussion and small-group collaboration. The more we balance and preface that in-class work with the written word, the stronger both parts of your learning will be.

The beauty of the devices we all have is that they give us access to limitless text — they put us, at all times, close to compelling essays, powerful short stories, beautiful poetry, even the best books. If you learn to read for yourself, not just because you are in school, you will have a lifelong habit.

And if reading for yourself seems clichéd, reject that seeming cliché. Embrace the truth of it, which is that reading makes you a better person. This works for literature as well as the essays you will strive to emulate. It’s the simplest shortcut:

http://lifehacker.com/four-reasons-why-you-should-read-literature-1644487950

Summer reading will be our first look at how literature, including nonfiction, affects us.

Course Orientation

We are now at the end of the course syllabus. While you continue our in-class writing and reading, use your homework time to continue here:

Course Orientation: September, 2018

That orientation post will acclimate you more quickly to this style of learning than anything else at this stage. Take your time, read carefully, and ask questions. The deeper you dive, the more quickly you will feel comfortable.

You can post any of your questions so far in the comment section below. You can also send an email or schedule a time during the school day to meet.

  1. The shape of the year is interesting. Class time — face-to-face time — matters most, and the first two quarters have lots of starts and stops. You can (and will) learn interstitially — you have to learn interstitially in this day and age — and you can augment your learning online. You can’t replace face-to-face work. So it’s interesting that the first two quarters are desultory: long weekends, days off in the middle of the week, plenty of fire drills, etc., plus distractions like Spirit Week, college applications (for seniors), and the inevitable influx of bad weather. The second semester is pretty solid, though, with plenty of time to build momentum and shake off the effects of the desultory start of the year. Spring break is predictable. The rest of our schedules lines up in 15-day blocks of time. ↩

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Course Orientation: September, 2018

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Part 1: The Occasional Bottomless Abyss

By the time you graduate from high school, you will have spent around 2,340 days in public education — about a third of your life up to that point, depending on how the hours are calculated. You might remember how it started:

http://www.theonion.com/article/6-year-old-stares-down-bottomless-abyss-of-formal–2510

That’s from The Onion. It’s satire, although some people don’t always get the joke. In our course, we’ll occasionally look at satire as one of the only ways of dealing with unsettling or upsetting stuff — here’s another, more recent Onion article on schooling, for instance, that speaks to some of the systemic problems we face.

You’ve been doing this for a while, though, and are close to the end of the experience. You’re used to those systemic problems. The first day of school, with its flurry of handouts and icebreakers and generally miasmic exhaustion1 is familiar to you.

This course requires you to pay attention from the opening bell. We need to look at education — at your education — from a fresh perspective. Start with this video, which animates a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson:

That video was the initial inspiration for what you will experience this year in our classroom. That’s the philosophical crux, to give you another word worth knowing.

Part 2: The Syllabus

You’ll notice that this post addresses all of you, whether you are enrolled in AP Language or English 10. Each class period is separated on Google Classroom, which we’ll cover momentarily, and your instructional posts will obviously be separate; this digital space is shared, however, in the same way our physical space is shared.

This is by design. All English Language Arts courses address the same universal skills and traits, whether you study memoirs, poetry, or contemporary nonfiction. There is a lot to gain from observing what your peers do, hearing their questions, exchanging ideas, etc, so this website expands your ability to do that.

The physical space is known as a makerspace. Load your course syllabus to learn more about what that means for you. Find your course on this website, or follow the links posted on Google Classroom. You’ll find that the syllabus hits some of the notes you’d expect to hear, but the tune is different. Pay attention to those differences.

Part 3: Starting Up the Feedback Loop

As the syllabus tells you — as every instructional text will tell you, repeatedly — running a makerspace does not mean you’re without deadlines, homework, feedback, etc. Far from it. That’s why Google Classroom is indispensable to us: It gives you formal assignments, due dates, and requirements, all neatly linked to instructional posts.

You have already been invited to your course. If you did not receive the invitation sent on September 1, use the appropriate code below:

English 10
  • P2 English 10: bdd493u
  • P7 English 10: sf21ta4
English 11
  • P3 English 11: btrb0t3
AP English Language & Comp.
  • P5 AP English Lang: kojome
  • P9 AP English Lang: mc747z7

Assignments and updates will appear in the stream. When you’re ready, that’s where you’ll also find the first writing assignment of the year, which will deal with summer reading.

Feedback works differently in a makerspace. Read about this here:

Mongering and Congeries

That post is essential reading, if you want to be successful in here. Again, this sort of flipped instruction also helps you develop as a reader. It scrapes off some of your summer atrophy, too.

Part 4: Clarity from Effort

As you complete your first assignments, you will experience firsthand what the typical day in here looks like. You will see what each part of the classroom does and learn more about how assessment works.

In other words, you learn by doing in here. You also learn by reading lots and lots of teacher-written posts. To help clarify what a typical day looks like, for instance, you could read this essay:

Circadian Dynamics

This is the basic idea of how each day’s period works. The background and notes are provided outside of class, which frees us up to do more with the 40 minutes or so we have together2. We might circle up some days; we might talk in groups or meet individually; we might take practice tests or take a shot at timed writing. There is enormous freedom to do what is needed, and you will direct most of the lessons yourself.

Your job, then, is to know what you are doing each day and to waste no time in doing it. That is the most important part of this course, so it gets a rare bolded font: When we are together in our classroom, you must be ready to work.

The interstitial/online elements are there to support this (and to make the Sisyphean grind of high school a little more manageable). Grade abatement is there to free you and empower you. Still, technology is only a tool. There is no replacement for the learning that occurs through discussion and collaboration when you share a learning environment with someone.

This essay explains more about how crucial our face-to-face work is:

Head Training: The 36th Chamber

(It also lets me continue to reference Wu-Tang and Grindhouse kung-fu movies.)

If nothing else, I want you to be able to answer these two questions each and every day:

  1. What are you working on?
  2. What help do you need?

If you can’t answer either, that will be an issue, because you will always have work to do, and most of that work will be easier with help. If you believe you’ve discovered a day without work, let me know. I’ll redirect you. During the first few weeks of school, for instance, you might need time to go over the syllabus. You might need help setting up your Google account. You might want help with your first writing assignment.

You face no risk right now, so ask questions and try things out. The more you experiment and the harder you work over these first few weeks, the easier you will find it to begin generating evidence for your grade abatement profiles — a concept that will be second nature to you soon enough.

We’ll end this first post3 with an essay on what it means to take risks like this:

Molecular Learning

Welcome to Room 210, and to Sisyphean High. Good luck.

  1. That word, miasmic, is a really good one for far too many school-related situations. I first encountered it in this review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was part of a unit on horror movies and censorship years ago. It’s a particularly smart look at horror cinema, but it’s the use of language that made it worth teaching in the classroom. ↩

  2. The essays haven’t been updated to reflect any changes to our bell schedule, mostly in an effort not to lose the Wu-Tang allusions. ↩

  3. Which is longer than most future posts will be. This one needs to be as dense as possible, because this is the overview of the year. You need a few dozen chances to realize the most important truth: This course is different, and only by leaning into those differences will you be successful. ↩